3 stocks you just bought

Cathie Wood saw its investments rise in the second half of 2024 after a slow start. The co-founder, CEO and primary stock picker of Ark Invest hopes to jump ahead in the market as early as this year. Ark kicked off the first full trading week of 2025 by making some moves.

Wood added to her existing stakes in Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), getlab (NASDAQ:GTLB)and Pacific Biosciences of California (NASDAQ:PACP) on monday. Let’s take a closer look at Ark’s latest purchases.

A leading online retailer may not seem like a bargain. Amazon stock reached an all-time high last month. Shares rose 44% last year, four times the 11% increase in net sales it posted during the first nine months of 2024. However, recent analyst notes suggest Amazon is moving higher.

Wedbush’s Scott Devitt raised his price target for the e-retailer from $250 to $260, calling it a top pick for the new year. Amazon’s top line may not sound impressive, especially with its own guidance calling for net sales growth to slow to 7% to 11% during the holiday quarter that ended last week. However, Devitt is looking to expand margins at Amazon. He expects a 24% jump in operating profits at Amazon next year, faster than some other members of the “The Magnificent Seven“Stocks.

Devitt’s new price target of $260 implies an upside of 14% from current levels. It’s a modest amount of upside, but the Wedbush analyst didn’t set the high water mark for 2025 updates. Wolfe Research’s Shweta Khajuria boosted her price target on the stock to $270 late last week, 19% above where the stock currently rests. Amazon may not look cheap, but Khajuria sees expectations rising slightly through 2025 as bullish catalysts kick in. Devitt has been encouraged by Amazon’s momentum. The cloud hosting business that is the backbone of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has achieved accelerated sales growth for four consecutive quarters.

Amazon’s annual net sales growth has failed to reach 12% in each of the past three years. Analysts see more of the same in 2025, but this should continue to be a fundamental growth story.

Like Amazon, GitLab rose each of the first three trading days of 2025. Unlike Amazon, GitLab investors saw their shares fall by 10% in a booming 2024. This does not mean that cloud-based software provider development tools have lost their popularity.

At least 16 analysts boosted their price targets on GitLab after it posted better-than-expected financial results. It was an “overcome and lift” performance. The 31% revenue growth for the fiscal third quarter it reported in early December may have been less than half the pace it was on two years ago, but it easily exceeded Wall Street professional expectations. It is too It beat analysts’ earnings estimates by 44%, extending its streak of over 40% final results to five consecutive reports. It also raised its guidance for the full fiscal year, implying that the current quarter is also trending ahead of where market pros are in predicting GitLab’s fiscal fourth quarter.

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